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Saturday, June 15, 2013

Over the last 2 weeks I've spent every spare minute I could find spinning the fibre that I combed and I'm very pleased with what I've achieved. It takes a very long time to fill a bobbin when you are spinning extremely fine singles.

While spinning I was considering leaving the yarn as a singles yarn. Here's what Peter Teal says on the subject:

When embarking on the production of plied yarns the spinner should consider the amount of extra labour involved over making a singles yarn of the same count. For example two yarns of half the diameter of the finished yarn have to be spun, and here one should remember that spinning time increases as the diameter of the yarn decreases, then the two yarns have to be combined by a third twisting operation. A plied yarn is therefore very costly in terms of time to produce.

But after thinking about the benefits of plying the yarn:
It balances the yarn
Plied yarns are more uniformly strong

I decided to ply after all

The result was 150g of combed fibre which I worsted spun into 2 bobbins of singles yarns on my Traveller wheel at 11 TPI, these were then plied together at 11 TPI. I have 1590mtrs of perfectly balanced lace weight yarn. It's off to the dyepot.